Henry Kissinger did not invent some novel doctrine of foreign-policy-by-barbarous-atrocity, he simply continued the family tradition.
Henry Kissinger straddled US foreign policy across two presidencies from 1969-1977. Notable in the current moment is the framing that Kissinger was somehow uniquely evil–and that he shifted US policy in this direction.
Christopher Hitchens described Kissinger as a “one-man rolling crime wave”, and his actions as “the wickedest thing ever done in American political history”. But is this correct?
Kissinger had his fingerprints over Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, Chile, Argentina, Bangladesh, Cyprus, greenlighting genocidal atrocities. But these actions were not uniquely Kissingerian. They had already been templated by previous US policies.
Gaza With Snow
In Korea, one fifth of the population was killed. What had been done tactically to cities was strategy for Korea, with 635,000 tons of bombs dropped.
Take the unimaginable, atrocious barbarity of the bombing of Northern Gaza, and then double the intensity of that bombing, magnify the theatre of bombing 800 fold, then add snow.
Those scholars who critique Kissinger’s genocidal bombing of Cambodia as sui generis would do well to take a brief glance in the rearview mirror. Kissinger was not a criminal outlier inventing wicked new tools of US foreign policy while corrupting its institutions, he was reapplying well-rehearsed practices and policies.
Jakarta in Buenos Aires
Likewise, those who lament Kissinger’s “unprecedented” genocidal dirty wars in the Southern cone, need only to take a quick glance back at Indonesia to understand that this was following a pre-existing playbook.
From 1965 to 1966, the Suharto dictatorship, under the guidance of the CIA, murdered 500,000-1.2 million communists in Indonesia. The CIA evaluated it as “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”.
“Operation Condor”, the continent-wide purge of leftists that Kissinger is implicated in, was the transplantation of Indonesia’s “Jakarta Method” to South America.
The Largest Mass Grave on the Planet:
But even Indonesia’s massacres were templated by the Bodo League massacres in South Korea, in which the Korean military, under the guidance of the US military, genocided hundreds of thousands of leftists within weeks in the summer of 1950.
The Bodo League, “the league of guidance and education” was a mass public registry where everyone who was suspected of leftist sympathies was encouraged to register in exchange for amnesty and rations.
The edict from the US-puppet president Syngman Rhee was to kill everyone on the list.
The total number of Bodo League registrants was 300,000. Orders were also given to kill everyone who was a member of the South Korean Worker’s Party, another 360,000 people. Families were also killed. A single mass grave identified in Daejon is over 10 football fields long. There are over 150 identified mass graves.
Kissinger’s atrocities fall solidly within the behavioural norm for US policy in light of the above history. Scholars like Grandin suggest that Kissinger degraded American Foreign policy from rational policy characterised by “elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support” into something impulsive and idiosyncratically monstrous.
But Kissinger did not invent some novel doctrine of foreign-policy-by-barbarous-atrocity, he simply continued the family tradition with business as usual: coups, terror, torture; rolling genocides; all combined with his signature deft Machiavellian balancing and triangulation for “realist” considerations to ensure the continued domination of US capital over the planet.
A Side of Genocide, Rare:
Anthony Bourdain, once said: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands..”
It’s titillating and comforting to imagine Kissinger as a Pennsylvania Avenue Sweeney Todd, concocting perverse new recipes of blood pudding. A more accurate depiction would understand him as a journeyman commis delivering orders out of a well-worn, murderous cookbook: “The illegal we can do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little time”, he once said, preparing an order of mass murder.
Kissinger was the Empire’s “glorified messenger boy”, the Butler of Empire, rather than its puppet master.
Scholars have pointed out that the West won the Cold war, imposing capitalism on the world, not because it was morally and politically superior, but because where it could not terrorise its opponents into submission, it simply wiped them out. That process neither began nor ended with Kissinger. Vincent Bevins encapsulates this succinctly: “I asked him [an Indonesian] how America won”. He answered quickly. “You killed us.”
The Unctuous Butler of Empire
In this deadly war of Empire, Kissinger was not some diabolical rule-breaking genius, but simply a competent functionary, foot soldier, and facilities manager. He did not create new policy tools of criminality and violence; he merely applied the existing murderous toolbox with vicious, sycophantic aplomb.
Scolding obituary articles pretend otherwise. They are pulling the wool over the public eye. With or without Kissinger, the genocides continue, while Kissinger-bashing serves as a sanctimonious moral holiday, even as the dying Empire pulverises and grinds Gaza and its innocent denizens into rubble while preparing, Western, Central, Northeast, and Southeast Asia for one final omnicidal war against China and the Global South.
Scapegoating Kissinger in the rearview mirror is to conveniently blind yourself to the nuclear car wreck rapidly approaching the windscreen right before your eyes. This coming war in Asia may turn out to be war beyond the wildest, wickedest dreams of the Wicked Butler of Empire.
KJ Noh
K.J. Noh is a political analyst, educator and journalist focusing on the geopolitics and political economy of the Asia-Pacific. He has written for Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, Asia Times, Counterpunch, LA Progressive, MR Online, and People’s Daily. He also does frequent commentary and analysis on various news programs, including The Critical Hour, The Backstory, By Any Means Necessary and Breakthrough News. He recently co-authored a study on the military transmission of infectious diseases and its implications for Covid transmission.